But this criticism rather misses the point. Academies have greater freedom to innovate. Some academies have been able to use this freedom to break new ground and transform education.

At Mossbourne Academy, a flagship, 40 per cent of children receive free school meals but 85 per cent achieve five A*-C GCSEs.

Others, inevitably, have struggled. But that does not mean we should return to the comfort blanket of local authority control. As Jonathan Carr-West has argued elsewhere on this blog, the best services are free to innovate and experiment. This freedom is at the heart of Mossbourne’s success.

Freedom brings both success and failure. The real challenge is to learn lessons from both. Fortunately, the intense scrutiny that academy schools are subject to helps ensure that this process happens. The sponsor of the struggling school has already named a new regional director.

It could be argued that the failure of the school in fact demonstrates a system in rude health. A national monitoring system has identified failure and the sponsor has swung into action. And it’s precisely this kind of intolerance to under-achievement that the academies scheme was designed to promote.

Inspectors’ main concerns arose largely from weaknesses in strategic leadership, insufficiently robust lines of accountability and governors’ failure to recognise the weaknesses or to hold the academy to account well enough; all matters over which the sponsor has substantial influence and responsibility. So it is the suggestion that the school’s failure demonstrates a system ‘in rude health’ because ‘a national monitoring system has identified failure and the sponsor has swung into action’ that rather misses the point, namely that the sponsor should have swung into more effective action a lot earlier – particularly in response to the findings of an Ofsted monitoring visit a year previously.

And an independent review of the Academy programme would actually provide a useful evidence base for policy proposals as we approach a general election and the need to secure the best possible value for money in public services.